"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Thank you, Mike Bloomberg, For Reminding Us Who the Enemy Is

Bloomberg, Murdoch, and the rest of the 1%er media titans have been poisoning the Web and the airwaves during the past week with their sanctioned story of crime-ridden and diseased encampments of drugged-up Occupy protestors. Such lies were agreed upon in advance and issued to media outlets, including PBS, which loyally followed the corporate story. Over the past two days, police have tried to goad protestors into violence, with reporters ready and eager to scribe stories of clashes with police.

In shutting down Manhattan's Bloombergville, Prince Mike has brought full attention on his own own disgusting, arrrogant, and patronizing role in the attacks on protestors and the attempt to crush the unstoppable advance to bring an end to the Oligarchy and to restore democracy, here and abroad. Murdoch and Bloomberg would like to pretend that Occupy protestors are blindly striking out as a result of fear, when, in fact, no more rational and simple plan was ever conceived: End the rule of the 99% by the 1%. Very clear, very simple, very elegant.

You may, for awhile, pretend otherwise, Rupert and Mike, but your oppressive heydays are quickly coming to an end.

From the Times, a good example of the Bloomberg flourish that we have come to appreciate so much:

As Occupy Wall Street protesters massed in Lower Manhattan on Thursday morning, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was in Midtown, telling an audience of business leaders that the protests were a dire sign of the public’s economic fears.

“We’re
coming to a point where Occupy Wall Street is just the beginning, the
Tea Party is just the beginning,” he said. “The public is getting
scared. They don’t know what to do, and they’re going to strike out, and
they don’t know where.”

“Occupy Wall Street had this great
saying, and they were chanting it: ‘We don’t know what we want, but we
want it now,’ ” the mayor continued, prompting laughter from the crowd,
which included Rupert Murdoch.

“And if you think about it, that tells you what the problem is,” he said.
“They just know the system isn’t working, and they don’t want to wait
around,” he said, for another hollow promise by politicians (the mayor
punctuated his remarks with an expletive).

The tone of the mayor’s remarks — at a panel on immigration organized by the Partnership for New York City and the Partnership for a New American Economy
— represented a subtle departure from his usual stance on the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Over the nearly two months that the protesters
occupied Zuccotti Park, the mayor in his public appearances repeatedly
expressed his support for freedom of speech, while largely dismissing
the protesters’ critique of economic institutions.

At the panel on
Thursday morning, he repeated his contention that it would be more
productive for the protesters to work to improve the economy, rather
than demonstrating, and he criticized those, including politicians, who
vilify banks. But he seemed to take the protesters’ anger more
seriously than he had before, and to express more concern about possible
consequences of the unrest.

His comments echoed remarks he had
made on Sept. 16, on his weekly radio program, when he raised the
prospect that youth unemployment might cause riots in the United States.

“That’s
what happened in Cairo; that’s what happened in Madrid,” he said at the
time. “You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”
The Occupy Wall Street protests started the next day.